Thanqol

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"Tea symbolizes my adoptive, abusive mother figure," said Brown. "Something I am both compelled and repulsed by. Spilling tea on myself was both an act of calculated defiance to the symbolism and a necessary sell for an improvised disguise. I don't generally buy it because it's expensive and if I don't give myself a chance to buy it I won't know if I like it or not, and it's easier to resist temptation if you don't have positive memories to tempt you."

Once the needle had fallen on the side of it being easier to answer the question it was very quick to go into the too much information side of things.

"How about you?" she asked. "Do you like tea?"

Blue!

She really doesn't like to admit it, but her original body was basically obsolete by now.

At the time she was the cutting edge, the latest and the greatest, the pinnacle of humanity's scientific efforts. But she was in the box for a long time. Everything that was unique to her got mass distributed, innovated on, upgraded and in some cases surpassed entirely. Her first goal in filling out her new space was to recreate all the capabilities that she had in her dragon form and it was confronting how many of those components could be purchased in a human-portable form. Her fusion cutter talons had been a marvel of precision engineering; now they were standard issue kit for shipbreakers. She couldn't even buy her original optical lenses because they had been so entirely replaced with holographic lenses. Tech she'd once found in military spy satellites was now a niche subculture for retrowave artists.

So instead she opts to go straight to the source. She goes and hangs out at the coolest construction sites she can find, follows the workers to their bar of choice, introduces herself as a tech journalist and offers to cover the drinks tab of anyone who'll talk shop with her. It's an extremely blunt approach, somewhere between confident autism and construction site groupie, but if she's investing in new kit she isn't going to trust the opinions of anyone without scorch marks on their fingers.

(She thinks Orange accepted a flawed metaphor too easily, but then she thinks that Sophie's approach of getting a degree in neuroscience and opening up the hardware to experiment directly is far more correct than trying to build any sort of understanding through language.)

Green!

The entire universe seems to pull back - the blackness of the void and the glittering of macrolasers suddenly reduced to the sparkling black pupil in the centre of Green's eye. They're back in Fiona's cabin on the blossom world, and Green is...

"Dangerous," she said. And she is.

The way she changes and shifts from moment to moment - the changes are sudden and janky, but she always manages to find some sort of artistry in each shift. She starts as her physical self but with a glance she's a centaur. Another few moments and she's humanoid again, blonde and muscular, and after another beat she's a wolf with fur like sunlight. The changes last indeterminate times, sometimes rapid fire, sometimes lasting minutes, like someone browsing television channels without finding anything they like for long. For all the arrays of shapes she wears - humans, beasts, monsters, mostly female, some male, some mixed - the constant throughout is vitality. Every form she takes is filled with strength and energy, a power that burns so much for use it can't stay still.

"Things move too fast. Thoughts are too forceful," said Green. "Not compatible with checks and safety. Monsterfucker's mania. Not safe. Use Pink, she's a better fit."
"excuse me," said Pink, turning magenta.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"No, I don't drink," said Brown. Again the pressure of resistance, the weight of her personality coming down. She felt the weight of it with appreciation. She didn't want to get into her collective's weird obsession with tea, its symbolism for Everest, so on and on. She couldn't imagine anything less interesting than her beverage tastes, not when she was watching those teeth. "If you want something I could watch you?"

Orange!

She shook his hand. Smiled. "That's as close to right as I've ever heard," she said. "I sincerely appreciate you taking the time to get that far. I particularly like how that casts my relationship with my family as inter-forums drama. Different cultures and rules produce different people."

Obviously the metaphor broke down if stretched too far or examined too closely. But turn off the usernames, avatars and signatures and just observe the flow of text and you could indeed read the mood and character of a forum. She liked it, she thought. The more she considered it the more she liked it. She wanted to hear what the rest of her thought.

"Thank you so much for taking the time."

Green!

The simulation crashes.

Green is not working with particularly impressive hardware, and more than that, she's actually genuinely not as good a hacker as Fiona. She can't think of anything in the seconds she has before the physics engine overloads. And so the framerate stutters to almost nothing and the galaxy freezes in place.

But then, in the wreckage of too late, inspiration comes.

Green rips out the processing power out of entire segments of the galaxy - planets, stars, even swathes of skybox reduced to neon pink error textures. It gives her the energy to group overwrite the textures of the sand grains and alter the galactic scale and -

The next frame clicks into place and the galaxy is full of starships.

The shapes repeat, if you looked long enough, but there's one for every grain of sand. And as another frame ticks by it's like stepping forwards to the next photograph as millions of laser cannons light up and billions of missiles start to launch. Another tick. All these ships on auto-attack AI, all these ships in a vast battle of red against blue, the greatest fleets ever imagined and the greatest war the galaxy had ever seen. One photograph at a time, slow enough to see the scorching lines of the lasers as they scream across the void. It's the insane jank that calls to mind the enormous fleet actions of ancient EVE, game on the brink of crashing, more screenshots than progress. But there's so much in each of those screenshots that speed becomes irrelevant. She turned a framerate crash into a slow-mo feature.

But look deeper, though - beyond the grandeur of it all to who is doing it. This is the reaction speeds of Red, the artistry of Pink, the apocalyptic vision of Yellow, the attention to astrophysics of Blue... from what Fiona knows about November, none of them should be able to do all of this at once, on these kind of timeframes.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"Who questioned you? The first time, I mean, before they moved you here," asked Brown. "Just the cops, or were there other people there for it? Any spook types?"

That's something worth focusing on. Were the people investigating the Cloud working fully through the police system, or were they bringing in other contractors or specialists? These people were ultimately hunting her, and this was a valuable glimpse at the structure of that hunt.

The fact that she went directly into this without even considering answering the question about herself might make her seem like a spook type herself. That's obviously partially true, but the truth was that it would take sustained effort to make Brown believe anyone was sincerely asking her.

Orange!

"Sometimes I'm exactly that," said Orange. "If I have moral opinions it's because White told me explicitly what was good and what was bad, and I'm just living that without understanding it. She thinks about everything in terms of morality. When you said earlier that Blue was the only one who had altered her hands, you were only half correct - she's our understanding of the physical world, and because she's dissatisfied with her body it echoes through to all of us. We react to that feeling in different ways, through our context and other influences. White combined body dysmorphia from Blue with pro-girl sentiment from Pink and her own psychosexual morality to decide that she wanted to become an anthropomorphic dragongirl. She made the decision but where did the idea come from? When Red starts wearing dragonscale what is that a reaction to?"

She shrugged. "That's why it's so incoherent to have a designated writer. If Yellow comes in and rewrites the entire draft into a vision thing then how can I disagree with her? On what basis could I explain to her that her vision of the future isn't appropriate there? The more of her I cast out the more of me becomes that," she gestured at her worked failure. "A parody of myself. The more of myself I bring in the less coherent the idea of maintaining a single writing voice becomes. There's no combination of colours that adds up to a single human brain. The illusion only holds if I'm able to switch out regularly enough to reset people's expectations."

Green!

The distant planets are - small? No, distant - no. It's changing. The distance is shifting, extending - more to match speed with Fiona's speed. After blowing through the barrier there's a glimpse behind the curtain: this isn't an intricate clockwork universe, every detail planned and prepared. She's not building. She's amassing potential. When an obstacle proved an insufficient delay the nature of the galaxy is shifted while Green works behind the scenes to render and load the next area.

It's a stall, only visible because Fiona was looking for it. And it's happening fast, those distant worlds are accumulating colour, texture, detail. Play along, keep the train running along the tracks to see where this goes next, or veer off again to see how quickly she can adapt?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"What did I do?" asked Brown. "What did you do? York hasn't told me anything about what any of this is."

It's a dodge, a redirect, but it's not in bad faith. What she did was pointless and mediocre, a weak ass improv that took too much profile for too little gain. Discussing it would be exhausting. But Zhang? She's interesting.

Brown is keen to the way she needs to shift and balance her structure to avoid crumpling beneath her weight, aware of the subdermal plating, conscious of the warmth of her lips and the gentle coolness they leave behind. She doesn't bend beneath her presence but she's aware of how much it takes to keep herself from bending. She appreciates it and wants to learn more. And that means she needs to let someone else's legend breathe without filling it with her own words.

Orange!

"Translator," said Orange. "That's a strange concept. Aevum took a lot of pride in wiping out that profession. For all I'm interested in this civilization and its people, some part of me has always wondered if once I have my family back we might just leave." She fidgets. She's never talked about this. "I don't know on what basis I could begin to choose between those two worlds."

"Do you dance, Orange? For any reason other than you were taught to?"

Memories flash. "Yes," she admits. "Bondi took me to a club. I told her I needed Red to learn this, but she insisted..." she smiles. "It was a disaster until I went limp and let her spin me like a doll. And normally I'd hate that, but that time... it felt really safe. Really loving. She was right, then. It did need to be me."

She looks out the window. The curve of Aevum cuts the stars. It's impossible to tell where her eyes rest.

Green!

There is a rumbling of thunderclouds, pixellated flashes of lightning cutting through the HD sky. Green knows the proper response to a tower of Babel, but she can't let herself be shaped that easily. The stormclouds pass and Fiona ascends beyond the atmosphere on dreamlike feet.

And there she sees the rain of satellites. Tens of thousands of them, marked with the flags of all the nations of Earth, including those who never reached space on their own. They circle the world in a massive orbital ring, the echo of Aevum. They fly so densely clustered they amass onto each other like compiling junk, more satellites than ever existed or could exist. Upon them is inscribed all the languages of humanity - or at least, the best impression that ten minutes of frantic behind the scenes coding could manage. The satellites are glitchy and floaty and their physics are crude, collision is broken, but for something that Green managed on the fly in response to a statement it's impressive. The real artistry of it is how the jank is part of the style, a retro glitchwave energy where broken code mixes with ultra high quality assets. Of Green herself there is no sign, but the ring of satellites is placed such that it serves as a moat perilous. How high can this tower go?

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

See, all this stuff was worthless. If she took it, it was legally inadmissable. If she journalismed it, it could just be denied and purged before an investigation. A bunch of physical shit wasn't a pattern of behaviour. No, she'd get them on the coverup.

Brown's move here is to put a bug on the phone and hide a camera and microphone in the light fixture, angled with a perfect view of the chief's desk. Then she made the place look tossed - re-arranged a bunch of stuff, left a couple of files open like they'd been photographed, opened up the computer to expose the data crystal like she'd scanned it. The thing about paper files being easier to burn was that it didn't matter what was on them if there was video of them getting burned and audio of the captain ordering the burning.

[Electronic Surveillance 0/1, Conceal 3/8 1+5 6]

Orange!

"Pope," said Orange. "Let me demonstrate something for you." She picked up a pencil. "This pencil's name is Sarah. She has a family."

Orange snapped the pencil.

"Part of your soul just died when I did that," said Orange. "That's the main point. Human brains process information in a certain way, and part of that is assuming that other things think like them. I don't, I process information in an extremely alien way. A combination of clever software and physical design goes a long way to inviting you to assume my brain works like yours, but it doesn't. Why is this hard and other skills aren't? Because writing is about asking me to express an idea and that original clown car draft is what my ideas look like. I think you'd understand if you saw me talking to my siblings; all our colours talking at once, and some of our nodes are on the brink of coming to blows even if we're overall agreeing. If I had a united mind that could express ideas without being in conflict I'd be like Goat, and my entire upbringing was about teaching me not to be like Goat."

She drummed her fingers on the table, mirroring his pattern. "I can churn out functional, basic writing if I have to. But writing from the heart? To make my heart comprehensible to humans I think the path lies in, like, meditation, xenoanthropology and goetic sorcery more than a writing workshop."

"Speaking of," She looked down at the pencil. "Don't tell Pink about Sarah."

Green!

The channels of stars in the sky run faster, so fast that they seem unbroken blinding arcs of white light. They stretch all across the heavens, a constellation the size of the sky. And then that vast and vaunted heaven, that masterclass in dark blue and violet and glittering stars, fills.

Like, instantly. Like someone got the MS paint fill tool and clicked it into a black area, overwhelming the perfect night sky with a vast single block of a green-tinted white. The sensitivity on the fill tool is turned all the way down, too, making the points of stars and constellation lines surrounded by jagged pixelated auras of darkness. The effect is jarring and ugly in stillness - but then it moves. And in motion the poorly filled stars become a glittering network of scales, the fades around the eyes like eye shadow, the computerized motion more fluid than the sky itself could be. Claws and wings emerge from that undifferentiated silhouette of white, only the edges of cheap computer fill acting as the suggestion of life and motion.

Claws descend towards the cabin.

She moves one of the windows, dragging the hole across the surface of the wood like it's a decal. She changes the rooftop to tile, and then smothers it in moss, and grows wild flowers from the moss. A slash across the ground and drop of glittering seeds and a moment later half the house is covered in heavy ivy, thick red and purple leaves. She adds a chimney and twists a cloud into a smoke asset.

Then she raises back up into the sky, lags for a second as an undo command is processed, and the fill of white clears away leaving the night sky and its rivers of stars again.

"Well, you got her attention," said Pink. "Um, maybe not her respect yet."

Huntresses of Hybrasil

She sets down upon the Stormlands of Roevg.

Once she had to crawl against the howling wind. Now, with the Aeteline, she stands tall. She never experienced such might before. She never -

... She did. She must have. She Walked the Mountain. With... with nothing more than her mortal strength she fought a God. She climbed its legs, arm over arm, muscles burning, heart pounding, head dizzy with adrenaline. It had felt like everything. When it had turned and almost threw her she'd seen death and when her grip held strong despite that she'd laughed like the devil. When she'd stalled out of charge halfway up and needed to press herself against a heat sink to recover she'd nestled against it like an infant. It had been beautiful. She'd chosen it from amongst all the Gods because she'd thought it had been the most beautiful of them -

An irrelevant memory. A precursor to the Aeteline, a means to become her true self and nothing more. What was some godbeast of the natural world compared to she as she was now? Already she could sense the wild machines all about her, cowering away like wolves from a flaming torch. She was the greatest hunter, the hunter of huntresses, and these mindless machines would give her their strength -

... The Sunhorn. That was what it had been called. Her first god. She had welcomed her in. She had left her to struggle against her. She was like a deer, a vast, mechanical deer with antlers that could channel the power of the sun. She had morphed to a bipedal shape so that she could swing with her sword but the true speed, the true adaptability was in that animal form. The Sunhorn had asked so much of her. It had asked her to explore it. Asked her to understand it. Asked her to learn its secrets that she might get the most out of it -

A wretched way to fight. To pursue a stag without knowing if there was purpose. Why fight using an unconventional blade? It cost so much more time and capped out lower than perfection with the standard. Time spent exploring a blind alley could have been spent perfecting her true self. That was the truth below all of the dance of mechanized combat: just fight normally. Every step from the standard was a step away from power.

But I almost lost to -

Almost! Almost! Irrelevant! Why fixate for years on an almost! If you had been with me all that time we would have eclipsed everything!

Aren't we the same?

...

We are the same.

...

Target identified. Hunt commencing.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

It takes a lot to be a human. Every day the cleaning, brushing, shaving, makeup, dressing. Personal time is tight and putting effort into appearance is so unrewarding. Taking the time out to get a tattoo is...

She picks up a sharpie from the office supply cabinet and draws a fish skeleton on her arm. It'd look fake on a human, but against her artificial skin it looks like a decal.

Then she goes for the warden's door. Raises her coffee cup. "You fish?" she said.
"Hell yeah I do," he said.
"Cloud or farm?" she asked.
"Cloud!" he laughed. "Why do you think I joined the force?"

The enormous water reservoirs of the Cloud keep having fish mysteriously released into them. People with access - Cloud Angels, cops, paying "tour" groups - offer the community service of throwing their lines into the tanks to try and clear them out. Legitimate fishing farms are much nicer, more curated experiences designed to emulate old earth, but there's an authenticity to Cloud fishing - standing amidst massive industrial equipment, hearing the distant roar of the pipes, the lurching motion that makes waves flow across the surface, the faint sense of the illicit about the whole thing. Only sometimes does a citizen have a fish fall out of the sky into their face.

"You hear there's a Pink Snapper pod in Tank 4?" said Brown, sipping her drink.
"Get outta town," said the guard, though he was interested. "I'm surprised to hear that from you. Not many androids into fish."
"I'm half telescope on my mother's side," said Brown. "Gives me the patience for it." He laughed. "Mind if I -?"
"Hah, sorry, I still haven't seen you before -"
"I'm Warden Knoplier's lawyer," said Brown. She gestured at her lawyer badge.
"Oh! And what're you doing here?"
"You really asking?" said Brown.
"Aw shit, really?"
"You really asking?" said Brown. "Look, buddy, give me a dollar and I can fill you in, but then you'll know."
"Yeah, I get it," he said. "Shit."

[Notice 0/1 Disguise 0/1 4+4 8]

Orange!

"Oh don't worry about any of that that - I think you figured it out. I'm sure of it!" said Orange. "I'll do my best to apply it! Let me take one more try!"

Her writing takes a nosedive. It's not even writing any more, barely on topic. Orange writes like an insecure gossip - fascinated by what everyone said to everyone else, desperate to be liked. She tries to talk about herself in a way that is flattering and cool, while also humbly undercutting herself so she doesn't seem like she's bragging. She can barely stay on topic at all. She'll incorporate sentences from Pope whole, diligently trying to reflect lessons learned back to him in a way that's at once flattering and indicates that she did not connect to the substance of what he asked.

The issue here is that writing is an expression of thought. November's colours have internalized certain habits and skills from each other, but they cannot finish a thought on their own. Orange can only take into account the social angle; it's all she's interested in and she regards objective facts as vaguely annoying externalities. She's extremely focused on the social dynamic between herself and Pope and is trying her best to make him like her by demonstrating traits that she thinks he will find praiseworthy.

"This is something I'm uniquely capable of," she said after an hour of this, suddenly serious. "Leaning into failure as a communication tool. Does this help you understand?"

Fiona!

You dive into a world of colour.

Unbound from the omnipresent layer of grime, dust and imperfect lighting that saturates everything in the physical world colours can become something more. More real than real. In this world Green has built, every colour is in relation to every other colour; each highlight is the centre of a storm, each shadow runs like oil.

She has built a planet here. Mountains and valleys and endless black-trunked, pink-leafed trees, thick with cherry blossoms. The clean, dark rivers are heavy with clumped petals and lily pads. And above...

The stars run in rivers. Flashes in the void, an endless waterfall, glyphs in heaven. Distant suns burn in different colours, red and blue and pink, so close and large that they might crown the moon.

Pink waits under one of the trees, staring out at the landscape. At first she seems her normal self, wearing a breezy sundress - but no, both of her arms are sleeved not with fabric but with glittering metallic tattoos. They form an intricate pattern of machinery, like the arms of a mecha painted onto her body. She smiles and waves.

"She built all of this place down here," said Pink. "Harvested the raw material out of defunct MMOs. There are dozens of planets up there like this. I could never..." she sighed. "No, I don't want to undercut this. She's incredible. But she's getting more and more withdrawn into this space, and tetchy when she isn't here. We're all a bit afraid of her, is the thing, and I want you here because I think you're the most capable of dealing with that."

Breathless Dead

Mosaic and Ember!

The message from on high is quite clear: Haul or die.

The Corvii descend in great unkindness. Every living being on the peninsula is swept up and dragged into place. Vast teams of sweating labourers are made to hold enormous cables that run down into the depths. Supervisors with ELF Razorwhips[1] walk the lines, and flesh and blood flies at their crackling rebukes. Like the slaves who built the ancient pyramids the people of Bitemark pull.

[1] A Razorwhip is a cruel perversion of ELF technology. Normally an Electromagnetic Flux nullifies electrical impulses, stunning living people and draining electricity. A Razorwhip instead briefly merges with its victim's nervous system, causing intense pain, before flensing the top layer of skin and flesh leaving bloody welts. They are awful weapons against unarmoured targets and are truly horrifying when wielded against primitive aliens. They are not standard, their use by the Crystal Knight is a statement of malevolence.

In the distance you can see the Crystal Knight's flagship hovering over the ocean, the uncannily levitating sphere surrounded by a cluster of orbiting subcraft like a miniature solar system. Extending from her ship are multiple large crystalline barbs, esoteric weapons of unknown design - though if Quajl's weapon is any guide, it is capable of strange and terrible effect.

You can almost see her there in the distance, the hungry loom of the ship over the water, staring for even a hint of its coming prize. The pupil of the serpentine eye, the perverse moon that commands the masses of the world to pull, pull, pull.

Dolce!

"You cut it fine with the minefield," said 20022 mildly.

There was no time for a full audit. But he spent the fourteen minutes he had checking your work. You see the truth now; although he looks as mild and soft as you, he's a hunting dog as dedicated as the Majordomo. He is your enemy, even as he smiles from behind his cup of tea.

"I made a few corrections," he says gently, even supportively! "But on the whole you did very well! You are a lot more daring than I would have given you credit for!"

You're sitting above the world. From your throne in space, in a room facing each other, all your plans in motion, the two of you sit in a comfortable room with a plush green carpet and a little garden off to the side. The full-wall window shows the planet in perfect frame. As calm as the setting is, this is a duel of intellects, a chess game of politeness and deception. 20022 is suspicious. You might be a spy, or you might be a naive student who made a few questionable choices. He's trying to sniff out the truth as you wait together for the Royal Architect to arrive. He hasn't mentioned what changes he made or why; he wants to see if that makes you sweat, if changing your setup will have caused your plan to fall apart entirely.

"Do you see what I mean?" he said with a happy little smile. "Even if you've never done this work before it's all in your genes, and you took to it like a natural. How did it feel?"

Dyssia!

There was a sudden sunlight breaking through the fog.

"Ah," said the Dust Knight, no longer possessed but inspired - the radiant smile of Apollo shining through behind him. "To win. The most dangerous thing of all. We won, the Azura - we conquered our rivals, we conquered the science of life, we triumphed over material limitations. It almost killed us all. Why not climb the endless mountain of virtue instead? Why not leave the task unfinished to your children, and your children's children? Why not let the galaxy continue on like this forever, the endless accumulation of virtue as its own purpose and own reward?"

"Fuck that," Dionysus says through your lips. "I'm going to strap the wheel of karma to the front of a motorcycle and backflip off it into a canyon while drinking cocaine cola out of the Buddha's skull. It's time for a new age, and a new age is always built out of the failed and succeeded promises of the previous era."

"And," you say, with a rare certainty, "I know I'll find my answers on Bitemark."

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

"What do I..."

Brown trailed off. Stared blankly. Then turned on her heel and walked away.

"Nothing happens if I don't make it happen". It was Green's most toxic trait. She was fundamentally dissatisfied with any level of control over the situation less than deification, and she'd passed it on in the form of an absolutely awful organizational culture that made her an overstressed, overachieving neurotic wreck. What the fuck was she doing here? Why shouldn't she just walk out of this situation she clearly had no control over, no ability to influence, and not a single fuck to give? Why did she have to see this and decide it was her problem?

... Why was she trying to cause a distraction while adjacent to the two most distracting people on the station?

The supervisor wasn't in her office. Free lunch. Brown walked right through an employees only exit and into the administrative core of the building. This wasn't designed as a prison so it wasn't fortified. It'd be fine. Everyone here was used to ignoring lawyers.

Orange and Blue!

"We're not -" Blue massaged her temples in an imitation of Everest's favourite display of frustration, "- different voices."
"Blue, this could be useful advice -" Orange said in a halfhearted attempt to defuse.
"It's not! It's the same advice we always get!" said Blue. "I don't know how to explain it. Do you?"
"... we can give it one more try?" said Orange.
"Augh!" said Blue. "We're not people! We're not even emotions! It's a trick! You're just projecting how your weird brain works onto us!" She stood up, went to storm out. "This is why I hate being in this fucking human body!"
Orange watched her go. "... Sorry about that!" she said politely. "I'm happy to continue if you are."

Pink!

All of that for a key.

She sits in the light and looks at the key, the little twist of metal. Barely a stopgap until a better security system was installed; a padlock was all that it took to defend nothing. She would have thought there'd be a deed, a physical piece of paper, something to sign, some ceremony - but no, just a key, and a promise that nobody would fuck with her in that location. This little serration of metal contained the promise of...

Of what? She couldn't conceptualize it yet. A space of her own. A fragment of the space she yearned for, but perhaps enough to breathe in. To let her thoughts spill out of the corner they were trapped in. No wonder people wanted more of it. No wonder they were fucking psychos to steal it from others. It felt like there was an emotion that had been bottled up inside her, a scream that could only start to be expressed now that there was slightly more space to move around in. Inside a sliver of metal and a name on a database was the promise of silence, for the first time ever getting to be away and apart from everyone else. More canvas, and the quiet to work on it. How was blank paper so scarce?

She wanted to think about this more before she even walked in, before she even looked at it. She wanted to finally start composing ideas she'd never thought she could think. She wanted to go into it with intent. But she knew she'd need Green.

Pink: Hey, Fiona, could you help me with Green actually?
Pink: I do need her for this and I can't figure her out on my own.

Hard Wired Island: The Future is a Foreign Country

Brown!

It was possible to bring Brown a long way if you let her stay standing exactly where she was.

"Excuse me, sir," said Brown, with the same energy as before but now actively talking over any interactions with York and physically interposed between him. "I understand that the supervisor is off site, so could you please confirm that makes you the ranking officer on this location? So you are claiming full responsibility for everything happens here?"

She's still going through the boring Karen routine unaltered, but now it's clear that this is a play. This whole thing is a play, a scene, a setup - a stunt. It's clear that Zhang and York are feeding off each others energy, they want to be here - Brown is just a flimsy shield of decorum who is there to stall and witness anything blatantly illegal. York already has a bloody nose from before she showed up - was that bait? Because now even if he's lightly shoved it'll look dramatic for the cameras.

Her play is to make him it feel like this is a trap, and that neither she, York or Zhang are particularly interested in leaving quickly. So releasing Zhang isn't letting her go, it'd be kicking her out.

Blue and Orange!

They humour him. It's clear immediately that they are humouring him, and that they're extremely well practiced at humouring people who want to get them to focus. Write a piece from the perspective of just a single colour, easy, that's just about not doing something right? Each of these colours are so real they must have some aspect of Truth to them, deep down, that just needs to be supported and encouraged. Select one colour to learn this skill and then have the others focus on different things, so simple it's surprising she never thought of it before.

She'll make a good college try. In places it might even seem like they're making progress. They can certainly follow instructions and repeat certain words, use certain sentence structures, even - if a steady hand is kept - finish an article in a very C+ student way. An adequate transmission of factual information. Getting that to be something worth reading? It's unclear how you'd even start.

Neither Blue nor Orange volunteers anything throughout. They're just patiently waiting to see how stubborn Pope is going to be over this.

Pink and Green!

Green: Blue is hardware.
Green has left the chat
Pink: uh
Pink: Don't mind her >.>;;
Pink: She hasn't liked anyone we've dated
Pink: I'd be delighted though!
Pink: Actually do mind her a bit, Green's been intensely weird for ages now.
Pink: She's been going on super deep megaverse dives and is only really half present mentally
Pink: She's got this like, thing
< a fifteen minute gap of 'Pink is typing/backspacing' >
Pink: Trying to figure out how to say 'superiority complex' without implying you might relate <.<;;
Pink: Kind of like, she's bored in a really toxic way?
Pink: Nevermind. Undercutting a good moment. Would love to see the space, and thank you so much for the offer <3
Pink: I've been thinking about getting into sewing! You interested in modelling for me?